But three times I had sex with men, and each event was an almost unimaginable disaster. The fact is, I simply wasn't attracted to men or interested in gay male sex. To be perfectly honest, I had always been the sort of man who would absolutely dread his prostate exam for days in advance, so the whole idea of anal penetration was going to be problematic for me at best. It was only after a trio of homosexual liaisons failed to elicit a single ejaculation--regardless of who did what to whom--that I figured I'd had my three strikes and was out.
More important, that second question assumes that gender is all about sex, or that sexual preference is at the core of our gender. I can't speak for other transsexuals, but there is no way on God's green earth I would have become a born-again woman just so the sex would be hot. No orgasm in the world is worth all that electrolysis.
Truthfully, I became an external woman because I have always been an internal woman. That's all there is to it. And I've known this most of my life. I think I had the first solid clue when my sister was born. I was five, and my parents put her in my arms on the couch in our living room, and I was absolutely enchanted. I told them I couldn't wait to have a baby emerge from my tummy, too.
Quickly--almost curtly--my father reminded me of the few, rudimentary biological imperatives I had been taught during the preceding nine months. My mother rubbed my back.
Outside our living room was a screened-in porch with a small pool, and outside the porch was a wall of lush tropical foliage that separated us from our neighbors. I handed my sister to my mother, stood up, and went stamping my feet outside into our backyard. I clawed my way into the brush, found a spot in the dirt to curl up in, and then I started to cry. Soon I was howling like a toddler.
"It's not fair!" I screamed over and over. "It's not fair!"
And while my parents took comfort in the notion that my tantrum was simple panic because I had lost a monopoly on their attention, I knew the awful truth. The things I wanted most in the world were going to be forever denied me.
Worse, when I started elementary school, I learned that even small manifestations of femininity would be out of the question, too, and that my desires were, apparently, perverse. Yes, I wanted someday to have a real baby and real breasts, but at six, I would have been pacified with a plastic doll that looked like a newborn, and a couple of pretend diapers.
I knew, however, not to speak up.
I knew not to ask for dolls that were babies, and I knew not to ask for dolls that looked like Amazon models with eating disorders. I knew not to ask for dress-up clothes and little-girl makeup, I knew not to pretend I was a princess or a mermaid or a bride. I knew not to be a girl.
At least I knew not to in front of my family or friends.
Sometimes in my room, however, when I had shut my door for the night, I would go to the store. I placed my desk chair behind my toy chest and put my plastic cash register upon it. And then I would be the sales assistant one moment and Dana the customer the next, and I would pretend to buy a frilly dress with pink floral edging along the collar and sleeves. I would purchase a handbag, long shiny hair like my mother's--a chestnut-colored apron my parents never used would suffice--and I would leave the emporium shaped like an hourglass Barbie. Then I would crawl back into bed and press my little penis and my little balls deep behind the fat on my six-and seven-year-old thighs, and finally I would fall asleep.
Some nights I'd be crying. Some nights, not.
Sometimes I would take off my pajama bottoms and sleep in only my pajama top, pretending the loose shirt was actually a little girl's nightgown.
Invariably, my last thought would be the hope or the prayer that when I awoke in the morning, I would discover it had all been a dream. I would wake up clothed in a cotton nightdress covered with flowers, and my room would be draped in all manner of pink and lavender and rose. My closet would be rich with dresses and skirts, and my mother would help me get ready for school by brushing the tangles from my hair, and slipping a colorful barrette in place. Maybe that afternoon I'd have ballet class.
I stopped hoping and praying when I turned nine. I didn't know the word deviant. But I knew the word bad.
Jordan was on hormones, and so were Pinto and Marisa. Pinto and Marisa were lovers. Pinto was the only one in the group on male hormones, and the only person who planned, someday, to have the artists in Trinidad or Palo Alto sculpt a penis from forearm and calf muscle.
The first time I went to a meeting, I offered Pinto my penis and suggested we simply swap genitalia, but of course they aren't doing transplants yet.
The rest of the group were cross-dressers, drag queens, and a few conflicted souls who talked a lot about hormones and surgery, but admitted they weren't sure what they should do. I recognized two young folks from the university, and they recognized me. We promised not to tell anyone our little secret until we wanted it out in the open.
Altogether, there were about thirty-five of us in the Green Mountain Gender Benders, but there were usually no more than fifteen or twenty in attendance any given week. I'm a case in point. The whole time I was a member, I don't think I went to more than a dozen meetings: I went five or six times before I started on hormones, and five or six times after. I only went once after I met Allison.
We gathered in a party room at the back of a very tolerant bar on Colchester Avenue, but there were no windows and the place always smelled like keg beer gone bad. On the bright side, the room was dark--it actually had wallpaper that was supposed to look like wood paneling--which meant that most of us looked better than we had any right to.
I'm not sure why the group wasn't as helpful as Dr. Fuller thought it would be. Part of the problem may have been configuration. I don't have the same problems as a heterosexual man who likes to pass in women's clothing in public, or a gay man who likes to parade for the world in drag.
Okay, I had some of the same problems: Finding a pair of dress sling-backs that fit a man's size-nine flippers. Discovering a chenille sweater broad enough for my shoulders.
By and large, however, we probably would have been better off with three separate support groups. But in a city as small as Burlington, Vermont, that just wasn't going to happen. There weren't enough of us for three different groups.
At least there weren't enough transsexuals.
Still, I did get something out of the meetings. It was through the Benders that I found my electrologist, a woman who wasn't flustered by the challenges posed by a man in her chair. That was nice. And I'm sure it was healthy to be reminded that I wasn't the only human being on the planet who'd had a miserable adolescence, or who'd been born the victim of a howling chromosomal error. And it was probably very helpful to see how much the basics in life were huge to people like us: Pinto's desire to pee standing up; Marisa's yearning to wear a B-cup without padding; Jordan's hunger to fall in love with a man, and for that man to fall in love with her as a woman.
But I've never been much of a joiner. And once Allison had said she would stick by me, at least until I came back from Trinidad, I lost interest in the group. I still had drinks now and then with Jordan, and once Allison and I went out to dinner with Pinto and Marisa. But I no longer needed their shoulders to lean upon, and I no longer needed their advice. Suddenly, I had an honest-to-God genetic woman by my side to make sure I didn't inadvertently choose clothing that made me look like a harlot.
When do you know you're falling in love?
I think you know pretty fast.
I knew I was falling in love with Allison Banks by the time she left my apartment after our very first date. And so I almost didn't ask her out a second time, because I didn't want to pull her into the unpredictable gravity of the world on which I was planning to land and rebuild my life. I had everything in place for the final step in my sexual reassignment--sabbatical, surgeon, a date with the knife just after the first of the year--and I didn't want to risk the possibility that she might fall in love with me, too. That wouldn't be fair.
But I did ask her
out again, didn't I? I simply couldn't stop myself, and Saturday morning I sent her an E-mail.
Was that selfish? Of course it was. Indefensible.
But the heart does many things well, and rationalization is right up there with powering the circulatory system. If you don't connect with her, I told myself, she'll think it's her fault. She'll think she did something wrong, she'll think there's something about her that you found unappealing.
Which simply wasn't the case. There was nothing about Allison that I found unappealing.
By early August I was completely smitten, and by the middle of the month, when the leaves were starting to turn in the hills surrounding Bartlett, I'd reached that wondrous point of no return where I would think of her constantly when I was awake, and then dream of her incessantly when I slept. I imagined us transcending--or, perhaps, simply ignoring--those little details that I, too, would soon be a woman, and Allison wasn't gay. I hid from her exactly who I was, as I hid it from almost every person I knew.
Why? Was it simply the realization that I would lose her once she knew? Surely that was a part of it. But that was only one of my reasons for remaining underground.
First of all, it would suggest a massive ego to presume that she was thinking of me in the same way, and was beginning to fantasize that we were destined to be together forever. And while people who've conditioned themselves to hide who they are can be many things, ego-monster isn't high on the list.
I also kept my arrangements to myself because I didn't want to make the month of August any more difficult for Allison than it already was, on the off chance that I really was more to her than a mere summer fling.
Let's face it, we met when Carly was about to leave for college, and she was more than a little shaky. This was, after all, her only child who was about to depart. And while Allison was used to being alone in her house a couple of nights every week, she wasn't prepared to be on her own for weeks and weeks at a time. She wasn't sure she was ready to go months without seeing her daughter.
I could also see there was all that baggage that must come with looking at your daughter one morning and discovering she's an adult. Suddenly, Allison realized, she was Mom to a grown-up. Here was a woman who still liked painting her toenails a fireball shade of red, and abruptly she had to cope with the notion that her little girl was her height and allowed to vote.
And so I didn't want to make August any more difficult for her--or for Carly--than it already was. She was planning to take Carly to college on the thirtieth, the Friday that began the Labor Day weekend. And so I vowed I would tell her no later than the end of the second week in September. By then, I figured, we couldn't possibly be so profoundly entwined that she couldn't unfasten the knots and get on with her life. Me too.
Clearly I figured wrong.
A woman takes her index finger and presses the nail or the fleshy print at the tip against her cheek, and she raises her eyebrows and smiles. She dips her chin just the tiniest bit. Without opening her mouth, she has just said, "Moi? Little ol' me? You can't be serious!"
A man--at least one who wants to be taken for a heterosexual--needs words to convey the same idea:
"Give me a break. You're out of your mind!"
I was in a phase where I was toying with mannerisms and gestures when I met Allison's ex-husband, and so I probably made a bad situation worse. We didn't get off to a very promising start.
It was the second week in August, a Sunday afternoon, and Allison and I were outside on her terrace. Earlier that day we'd had brunch with a group of her friends, and we really hadn't been back at her house for very long.
About four o'clock, Will arrived. He'd taken Carly to Burlington, where the two of them had been shopping for the higher-tech toys she wanted to bring with her to college. A new CD player was the big item, but they were also getting a floor lamp and a new printer for her computer. Will, it seemed, helped Carly hunt for those consumables that were rich with wiring and plastic and silicon chips, while Allison escorted her on the pricier clothing excursions.
I imagine there was a chance that Will would have come in and said hello to Allison regardless of whether there was a car he didn't know parked in the driveway. But the fact that an unfamiliar Honda was sitting smack in front of the little horse barn that Allison used as her garage guaranteed it.
We didn't hear them pull into the driveway, but we did hear them in the kitchen. Allison raced inside to greet them, and I watched from the terrace as she took from Carly what looked through the screen door like a tiki torch, and then gave her daughter a hug. Will put a pair of pretty good-sized cardboard boxes down on the floor. I considered venturing inside to say hello to Carly and meet her father, but at that moment they looked like such a cozy and intimate family unit that I decided to wait outside.
Probably, I should have stood. I should have paced around the wrought-iron table, or hovered with my hands along the back of the wrought-iron chair. I should have sent a body message into the kitchen that said in a polite but manly sort of way, "Don't forget to say hello to the guy outside on the porch."
But I didn't. I sat in my chair and crossed my legs and sipped my cranberry juice.
Then, when Carly and Allison finally brought Will out to meet me, I considered for just the briefest moment responding to the introduction the way I would in a few months, once the surgery was behind me. I considered remaining in my seat. Perhaps extending my hand to Will. Perhaps not.
It was a stupid idea. Inane. Selfish.
And so quickly I stood, but already it was too late. It wasn't that I had seemed feminine to Will by refusing, at first, to stand and greet him: On the contrary, I must have seemed almost threatening. Confrontational. Downright combative. I must have seemed like the new male in the pride, the young lion who can't wait to show off his fangs and his claws and his newly found power.
"Will, this is Dana," Allison said. "We met at the university."
"It's a pleasure," he said, taking my hand in his and attempting to make flour from my four metacarpals.
"My dad just bought me the coolest CD player," Carly told me, shaking her head and rolling her eyes toward heaven.
"Oh, good. You'll need that at college," I said, surprised that my voice sounded normal with my hand in a vise.
"I know she's only going to listen to classical music on it," her father said lightly, finally releasing my fingers.
"Can you stay for a drink?" Allison asked him.
"Yeah, I have time. Sure."
"Want a beer? Juice?"
"A beer would be great."
"Hungry?"
"I can always eat."
"I'll see what we have."
Carly and I sat down when Allison returned to the kitchen, and I know I expected Will to sit down, too. Nope. Oh, he went to a chair, but only to pull it out for his daughter. Instead, he remained on his feet right beside me, so I got to look up at him as if I were a recalcitrant elementary-school student, or perhaps a suspect being questioned about a string of serial killings.
And then the interrogation began. He wasted barely a breath on the weather--we agreed we could both feel the fall coming at night, but that was the extent of our meteorological commonality--before getting to the agenda that really mattered to him. Was I in the English or the English and Communications Departments? Where did I go to school, did I have my doctorate? Where did I live? Was I as friendly with all my students as, apparently, I was with Allison?
Now, it would be very unfair of me to imply that Will Banks was some sort of bully that day. He wasn't, at least not consciously. But he was on the terrace behind the house he'd once owned, and he was a mere fifteen or twenty yards away from the woman with whom he'd once lived. He was sufficiently belligerent that Carly said her mom would probably need some help carrying the food and the drinks, and chose to leave us for the kitchen.
In all honesty, I wasn't much better. I was angry about his juvenile power games, even if, inadvertently, I had triggered them by failing to st
and. In any case, I decided I could be testy, too.
Just before Allison and Carly returned with a plate of cheese and crackers and a tray of drinks, Will began circling around the foremost issue on his mind. Did I have any children? An ex-wife? And then, boom, ground zero:
"So," he said, "I gather you're dating Allison."
I wondered if he had ever before used the tone that he put into that little observation: dubious and condescending and protective at once. Certainly he would use it again someday, when Carly brought home the man who had asked her to marry him:
So, I gather you want to marry my Carly.
Clearly I'd been thinking about affectation and gender more than was healthy or normal or wise. It seemed to me that if Will could be threatened by the notion that his ex-wife was dating another heterosexual, he would be devastated by the idea that she was dating a fruit.